Be careful what you wish for. If the program tries to set up what cities to avoid, how much of the city should be avoided? I live near the L.A./Orange County areas and trying to avoid cities would be a disastrous undertaking since the cities are so interspersed and of vastly different sizes and the overlaps would cause this feature to be worthless so one would have to specify too many cities to avoid and also risk excluding a road or byway that would suit the trip plan.

The current Exclusions feature allow users to select the area and simplify areas to avoid. Since you can select many areas this provides the needed flexibility and doesn't outguess what a user might want, since YOU picked it. I think if they ever put in a feature that removes a defined exclusion, this would add to the usability of this feature. Now one must delete them all and start over.

I think requesting that a city be avoided will not be enough to satisfy what you want and it might be more of a detriment to trip planning for many of us who don't know other HUGE metropolitan cities very well and some good routing gets excluded because of it. Then we'll go back to asking for a feature that the user be able to select an exclusion area, which already exists.

Absolutely right, Art. "Avoiding a City" means different things to different people. To some it means "don't go anywhere near it" and to others "avoid driving through the center of the city". The way the software works now meets the needs of all different users. I like it!